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“Hollywood and Beyond”: Genre Hybridity and Transnationality in the Crime Thriller Films of the 1960s’ Korean Cinema

Sunjoo Lee 1

1한양대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper argues that the thriller which emerged as a mainstream genre in the Korean cinema of the 1960s should be seen as a transnational mode of film production rather than as a stable genre that had its popularity during a specific period, one that was overdetermined by the influences of Hollywood and French cinema. These influences are linked to the ways in which both the post-war film noir movies and the criticisms on them were globally circulated. The French critics in the late 1940s and 50s identified as the two key characteristics of the post-war US crime thrillers the sense of speed and the dark visual atmosphere, both of which enabled the critics to name the films as ‘film noir.’ These two characteristics were also reflected in the Korean crime thriller films in the forms of ‘tempo’ and ‘mood.’ These two aspects are transnational in the sense that they consolidated a desire of the 1960s’ Korean cinema for the system and technology of Hollywood on the one hand, and another desire of the local critics for the French cinema that they considered as the culmination of art cinema, on the other. These twofold transnational aspects were, too, in negotiation with the local, given that they were expressive of the local audiences’ fascination with the urban speed and sensory plenitude that they experienced in their everyday life. With these hybrid aspects in mind, I define the Korean thriller/noir as a dynamic mode of film practice through which the newness of popular cinema, the newness of film language, exotic sensibility, and local contexts negotiated and competed with each other, examining Black Hair (Lee Man- hee, 1964), The Tiger Moth (Cho Hae-won, 1965), and The Fugitive (Lee Kang-won, 1965).

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